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Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Reviewers Beware!

I was intrigued by the plot summary of Michael Mayo’s Jimmy the Stick, a novel published by
The Mysterious Press last year. It tells the story of Jimmy Quinn, a bootlegger
and gunman who used to be a runner for a bunch of mobsters. Then, Prohibition
kicked in, and Jimmy got his leg hurt. After the injury, Jimmy’s leg was never
again the same. Running was no longer an option, and Jimmy walked around with a
walking stick, hence his nickname “Jimmy the Stick”. So he retired from the
running game, opened a speak, and has been doing decently for himself.

But then everything goes to blazes. An old criminal pal of
Jimmy’s, Walter Spencer, gives him a call and asks him to come over to his
rural New Jersey home ASAP. The Lindbergh baby has just been kidnapped, and
Spencer’s hysterical wife is convinced that their child could be next. It’s
nonsense, of course, but Spencer has to go to a very important meeting out of
state. So Jimmy gets hired to protect the kid and to keep order around the
house.

And then weird things happen. A macabre discovery awaits
Jimmy after he sees Spencer off, and it seems to be a warning that someone
might indeed intend to harm the little kid. Then the local drunk gets found
naked, shot, and nailed to a tree – talk about overkill! Before long, thugs are
converging left and right, Jimmy has to deal with trouble back at the speak,
and everything just goes nuts (to put it vaguely and without spoiling too
much).

For what it’s worth, Jimmy
the Stick is a decent read. It’s not the greatest read I’ve ever come across, but
it’s far from the worst. It’s decent, and when you take it for what it is—a
hardboiled mystery story—it’s not bad at all. Here’s the trouble: I was
expecting something entirely different. And I’m afraid fellow reviewers are to
blame. What got me interested in this book were the positive reviews I kept
coming across. They kept stressing that this book felt like a cross between
Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie, and fool that I was, I took them at their
words.

But when you say something like that in a review, what kind
of impression are you giving your readers? I was expecting something written in
the Hammett mould, perhaps with a hero who isn’t entirely on the side of
the angels. I got that. I was expecting a webby plot. I got that. And there’s a
country house. I think that’s the reason people made the Agatha Christie
comparison. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. There’s nothing apart
from the country house that even remotely suggests the Christie touch. Sure, there's the Lindbergh kidnapping and that inspired one of Christie's most ingenious plots, but it's told from a hardboiled POV without something to really suggest Christie behind it.

At first, I thought to myself: “Oh! This is a really cool
idea! Throw the hardboiled detective of the Hammett/Chandler school into a
country house mystery and watch these guys, used to tough thugs, have to deal
with a more ‘genteel’ (for lack of a better word) sort of crime. This could
poke fun at the conventions of both the Christie and Hammett schools of mystery!”
Instead… I got a pretty conventional hardboiled mystery, which didn’t use any
of those ideas I thought we’d be getting. Part of it takes place in a country
house, to be sure, but that does not make an Agatha Christie-type novel. Ross
Macdonald’s The Drowning Pool takes
place largely in a small village and country house – does that make him a “cozy” author? Of course not!

None of this can be blamed on Mayo, but all this contributed
to my disappointment. Also, I have one major criticism: Jimmy is a lot more
interesting once he has become Jimmy the Stick. Whenever we enter flashback
mode, he goes back to being Jimmy Quinn and I can’t think of anything really
distinctive about him in that stage. He just has the usual backstory about a troubled
background, and then for good measure we get some lovely scenes where an evil
nun and a pedo priest try beating and raping him respectively. These clichés… really… get on my nerves lately. Either
way, it’s only when Jimmy gets himself injured and has to learn to fend for
himself all over again that I started to get really interested in the
character.

I’m sounding really negative about this book, but I don’t
mean to be. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it, but it is a decent enough read. I guess this just
serves as a warning to fellow reviewers: if you’re going to make a comparison
in your review, be sure to know what you’re talking about. Don’t just call an
author the literary heir of Chandler, Hammett, Christie, or Robert B. Parker in
order to be nice, even if the book in question has nothing to suggest the
author in question. Had I know this was a conventional hardboiled mystery, my
approach to the book would have been entirely different and—who knows?— I might
have liked it more. But I was expecting a Christie plot told in the Hammett
style, and I just didn’t get that. Instead, I got a Hammett-style plot in an
imitation-Hammett style. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you’ll probably
enjoy Jimmy the Stick just fine.

2 comments:

Doesn't sound so great Patrick but it is infuriating when it's the weifht of expectatuons that messes with your reading experience and not actually the work itself - Sounds to me though like what you really need now is a bit of Bill Pronzini, De Andrea and maybe a dash of Rex Stout which genuinely know how to deliver something that includes the virtues of Christie and Chandler!

There are plenty of authors out there that can combine the styles quite decently! This one never even tries, and obviously that's not its fault, but it's certainly the fault of my fellow reviewers for spotting something that was never there to begin with. It's annoying to expect something and get something else instead. It'd be like expecting a mystery novel, and awaiting the conclusion to this intriguing problem, only to discover that aliens are responsible and have the novel end with apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo as the aliens invade...